The Inane Sayings Edition

            On the day I got married for the first time, the priest ended the ceremony, saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” It was a popular saying at the time, one that sounds rather profound the first time you hear it. I suppose it means that you can start fresh, erasing, if you will, the mistakes you made on all the other first days of your life.

It turned out that getting married that day was a mistake for both of us. But that’s another story. When it dawns on you that every day happens to be the first day of the rest of your life, you realize just how inane the saying is.

Do you have a “favorite” inane saying? If not, you may not be trying hard enough. I happen to loath, “everything happens for a reason.” This is a short sentence that someone is bound to trot out when you tell them you lost your job, your car died and your significant other dumped you.

            The words are always spoken in a tone suggesting that suddenly, the person saying them is clairvoyant. They have miraculously developed the power to see into the future. The bad things that have just been visited upon you are actually a promise of better times to come. Order your Cadillac Escalade now.  I might accept this pearl of wisdom if the bearer of good news had just returned from say, Lourdes or Fatima the day before. That, of course, is never the case. More likely they just returned from Wal-Mart and not even with a Ouija board.

            When people say, “everything happens for a reason,” does it occur to them that they might be implying that you deserve bad luck? I mean who ever says that useless phrase when you tell them you just got a promotion and won a trip to Kansas City?   

            Here’s one you probably haven’t heard for a long time. Back in the 1970s when a lot of baby boomers were treating divorce like a rite of passage, some who had children were fond of saying, “It’s not the quantity of time you spend with your kids, it’s the quality of time you spend with them.”  In fairness, it wasn’t only the divorced invoking this line. Many households found it necessary for both parents to work.

While there is still some debate over which is more important, many leading authorities on the subject believe that quantity matters a great deal. One of the reasons I mention this particular saying is that it became popular before there was sufficient research to support it.  How many people took the time to access the literature on the topic that may have been available at the time? Don’t forget this was pre World Wide Web. I’m betting not many.

Mostly, I think people took comfort in the saying, perhaps worrying about whether they had done the right thing by their kids.  Sayings that go viral simply because they have a nice ring to them can indeed be harmful.

It’s been a long time since I heard someone argue quality over quantity when discussing childcare, but some sayings withstand the test of time, offering wisdom to all generations. Sayings like, “less is more” continue to resonate because in many situations, the arts in particular, less certainly is apt to be more. The saying dates back to 1855, in Andrea del Sarto, a poem by Robert Browning.

The “early bird catches the worm” may seem tired to some, but its essential truth is undeniable. And, perhaps there’s even more to the saying than meets the eye. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”

             Note to the worm: Don’t worry. Everything happens for a reason.